"…a bad place to live"

A student e-mailed me yesterday to admit that after three and a half years of endorsing the war in Iraq, he had changed his mind as of 2:00 p.m. last Wednesday. He’d read a piece in the Jerusalem Post, I believe, that somehow persuaded him once and for all that the war is no longer winnable and that the US needed to get out “as soon as possible.” It would be difficult to overstate my surprise at hearing this news. I’d encountered this fellow before he enrolled in my US and the Middle East course this semester, although he clearly doesn’t remember. A state worker in his late 40s, he is somewhat of a fixture in the community, known among other things for his occasional letters to the editor in support of the Bush administration. When our local borough assembly debated a resolution condemning the USA PATRIOT Act in the winter of 2003, he was the only person who bothered to show up in defense of the law, calling instead for a resolution in support of the troops; I testified in favor of the measure, noting that the worst excesses of the 1950s Red Scare actually occurred at the local level and not in the limelight of the House Un-American Activities Committee or the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, over which Joe McCarthy himself presided. A few months later, when I appeared on a public radio call-in program with two other academics from the Pacific Northwest, this fellow called in to excoriate us all for using our pulpits to criticize the Iraq War and the United States, where we enjoyed freedoms of speech more unlimited than any other place in human history. He was rather adamant about this, and I responded by muttering something irrelevant and condescending about the differences between the public sphere and a bar fight.

When I saw his name on my class roster this fall, I wrongly assumed I was in for more of the same. I don’t evangelize about my political views in class, though I can’t imagine it strains anyone to figure them out — and less so in a small, upper-division seminar, where I assume that students are mature enough to accept or reject arguments on their merits. Regardless, knowing what little I did about this student, I couldn’t imagine he’d take kindly to my generally unflattering narratives about the conduct of our government in a region few ordinary Americans know much about. To make a long story short, by his own accounting the course has had almost nothing to do with his abandonment of the war; he admitted that a few of the readings caused him to re-appraise some assumptions about the historical relationship between the US and Iran, but aside from that he seems to have arrived at this point independently of whatever impure, covert designs I might have had for this seminar.

I don’t know this student well enough to predict whether his support for this disastrous war will return later on in some form, but I will give him credit for offering up the best analogy I’ve yet heard for the dwindling public estimation of the Bush administration’s policies. In his note, he reminded me of the cold war slogan that no one ever sought to cross the Berlin Wall into East Germany. With this war, he wrote, “it seems like everyone is heading West,” which he thought was significant. He couldn’t think of a single person who had switched from opposition to support for the war in Iraq — instead, all he saw were people flowing in the opposite direction. Maybe, he added, those folks aren’t cowards or traitors. “Maybe they just realize that East Germany is a bad place to live.”